


these strange trails

by Ronabird



Series: build me no shrines [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Canon-Typical Clown Bondage, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-Typical Worms (The Magnus Archives), Daemon Touching, M/M, No beta we die like archival assistants, Non Consensual Daemon Touching, canon-typical Elias Bouchard, enjoy that tag, scene rewrites and short snippets, see notes for warnings and spoilers list
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-24
Updated: 2020-06-03
Packaged: 2021-03-03 09:54:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 17,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24349081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ronabird/pseuds/Ronabird
Summary: Mati fluffs her feathers out and draws them back in slow, like a sigh. Those thin eye-marks shift back into place. He stares numbly, and the dozens of them stare back."It’s alright, Jon," says his daemon, tiredly, in the quiet of their Archives. "This is who we’re going to be."He supposes there’s nothing to be done about that.Or: fourteen scars on the soul of Jonathan Sims.
Relationships: Georgie Barker & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Series: build me no shrines [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1767109
Comments: 124
Kudos: 389





	1. (web) the darkness got a hold on me

When Jon was still unsettled, his daemon liked to take unusual shapes. They liked insects best, and so she was usually perched on the arm of his glasses as a wasp, or tucked against his throat as a big downy moth.

 _Wasp suits you_ , his grandmother had said, just this side of snide. Her daemon had been a rock lizard, craggy with age and beady-eyed, and he didn’t like talking to Mati if he could help it. At most, he would level his flat glare on them, as though it might cow them into being less of a nuisance; Jon would jut out his chin to glare back and Mati would become an ever more massive, bristling, black-bodied hornet in his hair.

She had never tried being a fly. It seemed a terribly common, uninteresting shape, without the delicate brown patterns of a moth’s wings or the colorful sheen of a dragonfly. There’d been no reason to bother with it.

That had been the first horrible thing he’d noticed, when the boy— Daniel?— slapped the book from his hands. Jon had found himself on the ground, glasses askew, palms scraped, and Mati sitting still-dazed on his hand as a horse-fly. Something in the vicinity of his stomach lurched horribly to see her there, in a shape he hadn’t felt her take, bristling with little black hairs.

Something glinted on her back, over her wings. Silver threads of spiderweb.

Daniel had scoffed at him— "Little Einstein, reading a kiddie book!"— and then his gaze fell on the thing. Jon was still prickling all over with horror, and so he made no protest as the teenager picked it up and began to read.

 _Stop it,_ he thought at Mati, _change back. Be something else_.

And his daemon had quivered on his hand, shivering her wings against the pull of spidersilk, and thought back _I can’t. It’s hard._

That had taken his breath away like a punch to the gut: the sudden dread that this was it, this was them, they were a _fly._ So they didn’t realize what was happening to Daniel, at first. They weren’t paying attention to the pig at his side. Mati was always too little to pick on, so the boy’s daemon was always less worry than the boy himself.

She was the one that walked away first: stilted and jerky, step after shuddering step. It was only when she hit the edge of their range that Daniel started moving, too, with a gasp and a stagger. It put a little crease between his eyes, even as he frowned down at the page. And then, pulled by the invisible line between them, the boy followed his daemon away.

Jon trailed behind, Mati crawling stiff and sluggish up his arm as a fly. She stayed that way the whole walk, up til the mouth of the alleyway. When maybe-Daniel pressed the book to that final door, Jon felt it as a jolt of desperate, hungry fascination.

 _We need to see_ , he thought to Mati.

She pulled against the lingering tug of spidersilk, and with a final jolt, flitted into hawk-shape on his shoulder. Light and sharp, with bright yellow eyes.

When the boy raised his fist to the door, his daemon moved in uncanny sync. He rapped broad and clumsy with his knuckles, and she pressed the flat of her head to the wood. _Knock, knock._

When the legs stretched out from that darkness, Mati’s hawk-eyes could see every bristling black hair.

Jon doesn’t remember most of what came after. They must have gone home, Mati still a sparrowhawk tucked against his neck, trying to get as close as she could when she’d been a moth. He remembers thinking, _Change back. Be a moth for now._

He remembers her thinking, _No. This is who we’re going to be._

He remembers it took his grandmother a day to notice, but perhaps a year to believe it. After all, no one settles at eight years old. There is such a thing as being precocious; his situation went several steps beyond. It simply wasn’t _right_ , as people told him freely and often. He knows the police had sat him down no less than twice, to ask probing and poorly-veiled questions about abuse.

They’d found nothing amiss except that he was an acerbic, too-intense little orphan boy. And he’d found that Mati, ever so faintly, had silver streaks on the backs of her wings. As he grew, she didn’t molt out a dusty brown like the female sparrowhawk that lived in the neighbor’s tree: the feathers on her back came in a muted slate-grey, a few shades darker than spidersilk.

Two decades and too many traumas later, the Archivist inspects her colours again. Mati perches on his much-abused desk and lets him card through her feathers with scarred fingers. She is small and neat, her little body shifting with his every gentle touch. Still uncommonly colored, for a female: the rust-red barring extends in thin lines all down her breast and belly. He can’t help but notice, these days, that the shade puts him to mind of dried blood.

Ever since he awoke in a hospital bed, those markings have given the uncanny impression of thin, staring eyes.

 _It’s alright,_ she thinks at him.

He is looking for the glint of spidersilk in her feathers. He is looking for evidence that they’ve been puppeted. He is looking for anything, _anything_ , to explain what he’s been doing. (There had been a woman down the block, and she’d had a story. He’d seen it.)

Mati fluffs her feathers out and draws them back in slow, like a sigh. Those thin eye-marks shift back into place. He stares numbly, and the dozens of them stare back.

"It’s alright, Jon," says his daemon, tiredly, in the quiet of their Archives. "This is who we’re going to be."

He supposes there’s nothing to be done about that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content warnings for this chapter:**  
>  \- Mr. Spider
> 
> **Spoilers in this chapter:**  
>  \- Statement content from 081, plus vague allusions to events in S4.
> 
> **Daemons in this chapter:**  
>  \- Jon's Eurasian sparrowhawk ( _Accipiter nisus_ ) Mati - Sanskrit for _intelligence/understanding_ , and a Greek term for the evil eye. Female pronouns but male design, because I am powerfully indecisive and the aesthetic was too strong. shhh.  
> \- Jon's grandmother's daemon, a roughtail rock agama ( _Stellagama stellio_ ).


	2. (corruption) she has turned my heart black

To Georgie’s credit, it takes her four days to ask. Jon knows he can’t be an easy houseguest: he dodges questions about his _employment dispute_ , stammers through the story of losing his phone, peers anxiously through the blinds whenever he suspects footsteps on the landing. Subtlety is perhaps not chief among his skillset, and twice in a day he turns from the window to find her regarding him with raised eyebrows.

She asked about _his_ scars right off, of course. That’s reasonable. When one’s ex turns up on their doorstep, panicked and pockmarked with old holes, _What the hell happened to you?_ is really the only way to begin. And Jon doesn’t think his fumbling about parasites and skin reactions got them very far, but she at least dropped the subject. She let it go. Georgie is kind that way, he’s realizing.

Kind enough not to comment on the _other_ scars until the fourth day, when she finds him pacing circles into her carpet, Mati flitting tight restless loops around the room. She stands in the doorway, the scaled bulk of Clive by her ankle, and folds her arms at him.

Jon has the good grace to look sheepish. Mati, as a peace offering, alights on the shoe rack beside the water monitor. He turns one great reptilian eye on her, and she holds her feathers in tight and nervous.

"Jon," Georgie begins, with an air of immense patience, "what the hell happened to you?"

He opens his mouth to begin again about the parasites, and she raises a hand to cut him off.

"Mati’s feathers," she says, as though speaking to a very small and stubborn child, "did _not_ used to look like this, Jon."

Mati shudders, nervous, and shuffles her wings. Clive won’t stop looking at her; he flicks his tongue to taste the air, scenting her discomfort, and Jon feels horribly exposed. He fidgets with his hands, for lack of anything else to do, and tries to look resolute. By the pity in Georgie’s eyes, he largely fails.

"Mati is fine," he says. The little sparrowhawk, taking this as excuse to flee her current inspection, flits back to his arm and takes up her position there. He has the habit of holding his elbow out from his side, to make her a perch, and it is comforting to feel her little claws poking through the fabric of his borrowed sweatshirt.

Georgie’s water monitor shifts closer to her leg and leans against it, in a gesture Jon realizes, with a jolt, is offering comfort. She’s _afraid_ of him now, or afraid of whatever made him look like this: pockmarks up his neck and face, and dotted places all across his daemon’s body where the feathers stick out wrong, permanently rumped, over the scars.

"I’m fine," Mati says directly, to the room at large. "Really. But I appreciate the worry."

He would almost prefer Georgie looked afraid: instead, she looks _assessing_. And profoundly unconvinced.

"Right," she says. "Speaking for yourself, are you? That’s good; Jon never tells me anything."

Jon splutters. Mati just bobs her head to get a better look at Georgie, and Georgie-and-Clive look steadily back.

"We went through something unpleasant," says Mati, with rather more eloquence than Jon could have mustered. He would appreciate it if he didn’t know she’s liable to say too _much_. "It was horrible, and Jon isn’t really done with it."

Like that.

"But I’m not still hurting," she concludes. "So we’ll be alright. It’s nothing you need to act on."

Georgie takes this in with her arms folded. The lizard flicks his tongue again, glossy and dark.

" _Nothing_ doesn’t put scars on your daemon," she says.

She has a point.

"Jon," and she steps forward, away from the water monitor, who continues to regard them all with distant eyes. "I get that this isn’t easy for you. Acknowledging that you maybe, sometimes, experience emotion."

He goes a little indignant, at that, even if it’s fair. "I don’t—"

"You do," she interrupts. "When you’re hurt, you go all—" and she salts the wound by _gesturing_ , vaguely, to all of him, "— _like this._ It’s maddening. If you’re going to be doing it under my roof again, might as well tell me what caused it."

He folds his arms, now, even though it makes Mati flutter to keep her balance. Not terribly elegant, knocking one’s daemon off-kilter to glare. Georgie meets his look head-on, closer to _pitying_ than _actually fazed_. He knows how he looks. He knows how _Mati_ looks, with her feathers at wrong angles and the round worm-scars marking up the thinly-feathered insides of her thighs. On him, the pockmarks are distinct but small; on her tiny body, they look massive.

The pity makes his skin crawl. Jon swallows hard and drops his gaze to glare at her carpet, instead. Georgie sighs.

"Later, then." Her lizard flicks his tongue again, still watching them. "But I’m not waiting til you’re _ready_ , Sims, or we’ll be here a hundred years."

In the end, it’s a few weeks and three new scars. Jon comes home cradling the hand Perry ruined, Mati hopping awkwardly, one foot curled towards her body in sympathetic pain. The slice Detective Tonner put in his throat is still unfortunately pink and raw; the clawmarks scored down Mati’s narrow wings make her feathers stick up wrong at all times. And she spends all her time tucked against the hollow of his throat, or perched as close against his chest as she can be, while their still-stretched bond _aches_ at them.

Georgie takes one look, her lizard gives the air one taste, and the two halves of them look at each other in silent agreement.

"It’s been a hell of a week," he tries.

She has none of it.

But, well— even with Jon stammering out his explanations, hunched in on himself, Mati tucked beside his jaw, she takes it well. She is unsurprised by the news of _monsters being real_. She waves off mention of _murders_. She… handles it.

And then she asks, "Is that what happened with the, what, the holes?"

He breaks to discomfort and reaches up with his good hand— feels wrong, not using his dominant hand for this— to stroke Mati’s feathers. The fluff of her breast is soft as ever, even if it gives him a visceral and horrible little jolt every time he encounters feathers pushed out of alignment by worm-scars.

"That was, ah… that was one of the other ‘avatars’, I suppose? But, uh, one that had become… very much a monster."

Georgie’s eyebrows climb, at that.

"Hate to ask," she says, "but, you know. What happened to their daemon?"

Jon swallows hard, and Mati draws her feathers in tight around his fingertips.

"She still had her," he says, and his voice is terribly small. "At the end. But, uh… unrecognizable."

Georgie’s gaze is terribly expectant.

"According to reports," says Jon, "she had been a rat. But, the… the worms had eaten her all full of holes. You could barely make out what you were looking at."

Georgie has nothing to say to that, except a soft, "Christ."

Jon makes his little sound of agreement, as though it’s just… one more unpleasant fact. As though it’s not something he sees in his dreams every night. It’s incredible and horrifying, how many worms can fit inside a rat. A rat is really not terribly big.

Neither is a sparrowhawk.

In the end, she makes him tea, and she asks if he knows about any _Death_ -related monsters. He says yes. She tells him the story.

The whole time, Mati stands with Clive, her bad foot up, leaning against his scaly bulk. Very gently, he leans back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content warnings for this chapter:**  
>  \- Discussion of Jane Prentiss
> 
> **Spoilers in this chapter:**  
>  \- Refers to events through 093.
> 
> **Daemons in this chapter:**  
>  \- Jon's Eurasian sparrowhawk ( _Accipiter nisus_ ) Mati - Sanskrit for _intelligence/understanding_ , and a Greek term for the evil eye.  
> \- Georgie's Asian water monitor ( _Varanus salvator_ ) Clive - for Georgie's namesake Clive Barker.  
> \- Jane Prentiss's rat ( _Rattus norvegicus_ ).


	3. (vast) and you're oh so pretty when you stand on the edge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a short one, so y'all get a two-parter today. Thanks for keeping me going!

Michael Crew’s daemon is a peregrine falcon. This is, Jon reflects, perhaps unsurprising; Simon Fairchild’s is on record as an Arctic tern. He wonders if it’s a universal trait of those who worship the Vast, having a soul shaped like a bird. He wonders if it’s more specific, and if all the birds are species that fling themselves directly downwards from dizzying heights many times a day.

He would not be altogether surprised if the answer was yes.

So, from the moment he knocks on the man’s door, he is prepared to meet a falcon. He is _not_ prepared for the man to answer the door alone, bird not in sight, and for a moment Jon’s stomach drops in startled horror. Mati draws in close against him, perched on his arm.

"Yes?" says Michael Crew, expression unreadable, and Jon stumbles through an introduction. Eventually the man shrugs, apparently unfazed to have the Archivist on his doorstep, and stands aside to let him in.

It is with deep relief that Jon spots the falcon daemon, large and glossy, sitting perched on the other side of the room. It is with a new bolt of horror that he realizes she is _too far away:_ eight or nine meters, maybe. An average range might cap out at _three_.

Michael— Mike— pours his tea and ignores the staring. Jon stumbles for a recovery.

"You feature in some of our statements," he says, desperate. Mike spoons in sugar and goes _hmm?,_ politely disinterested.

Mati is still looking at the falcon, sitting too far away. She is… marked. There is an odd patterning over her feathers, light marks webbing over the dark blue-grey of her wings: not thin lines of lightning, but infinitely curling shapes, like miniature spiral galaxies. The pattern has _symmetry_ , repeating on some tiny scale. Fractalline. 

"How did your daemon get that scar?" asks Jon, before he can stop himself, and Mike sighs long and tired.

And then Mati is yanked _away_.

Jon chokes, frozen in horror. He is sitting exactly where he is, but Mati— Mati is—

She’s right beside him. But the bond between them is _stretched distant,_ in a way that makes the whole world lurch and veer and tilt and leave his head spinning. He cannot breathe for the feeling of falling, and for the agony-and-thrill of being just past their limits.

"And I was trying so hard to be polite," says Mike. "Bit of respect is too much to ask, isn’t it, from you and yours?"

And then he tells the story.

Jon listens. He can’t— he can’t _not_ listen. Beholding is, after all, what he _is_.

And then it is over. Jon comes back down into himself gasping, and Mati trembling, and they crowd against each other as though it might ground them against the sense that the world should still be spinning.

"Right," says Mike Crew. "Off you go, then. Take my mercy and leave."

His daemon is still watching them from the other side of the room, from _too far away_ , stretched just far enough it must hurt beyond imagining. Jon is still breathless and reeling, Mati dazed, the bond between them aching horribly.

Mike’s falcon is watching them in something like amusement. Even now, unsteady on her little feet, Mati can’t stop looking at her: she holds herself sleek and shivering like a bird about to take wing. A reasonable daemon would move back to her person, would close that horrible gap between them, stop the soul-deep _stretch_.

Jon can’t stop Knowing that Mike Crew and his falcon feel that stretch all the time, always, on a knife’s edge between thrill and pain.

And then there’s a knock at the door.

Mike’s eyes harden; his falcon’s grip tightens on her perch.

"I thought you said you came alone?" says Mike, and just like that, before Jon has a chance to scream, Mati is yanked impossibly far away again. He tries to scream. She is just there beside him, but he can _feel_ her, feel the distance between them, a strain just on the edge of breaking—

He is distantly aware of Mike Crew opening the door.

He is _very_ aware of the moment Detective Tonner bursts into the room, a wolverine at her heels.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content warnings for this chapter:**  
>  \- Daemon bond trauma
> 
>  **Spoilers in this chapter:**  
>  \- Refers to events through 090.
> 
>  **Daemons in this chapter:**  
>  \- Jon's Eurasian sparrowhawk ( _Accipiter nisus_ ) Mati - Sanskrit for _intelligence/understanding_ , and a Greek term for the evil eye.  
> \- Simon Fairchild’s Arctic tern ( _Sterna paradisaea_ )  
> \- Mike Crew’s peregrine falcon ( _Falco peregrinus_ ) - To see her markings, look up Julia sets.  
> \- Daisy Tonner’s wolverine ( _Gulo gulo_ ) - Lottie, for a variety of lavender.


	4. (hunt) prowling the night raising hell with the boys

Daisy Tonner’s daemon is a wolverine. 

Jon thinks, madly, that the thing looks _rabid._ But, no: this isn’t uncontrolled violence, isn’t a blind lashing-out. The great hulking animal bristles all over with malice, but there’s a hungry intelligence in its eyes, and it is focused on him. It is focused on Mati.

He stumbles back, away from the chair Mike had him in, and away from the sprawled shape of Mike now on the floor. The man’s daemon had come shrieking and flapping into the conflict, but a living room doesn’t really afford the space for a falcon to fight. She is on the ground now with her person, dazed, reeling.

The wolverine skulks forward, focuses its attention on the bigger bird. Mike’s peregrine gives a dizzy screech, full-throated and parroty, nothing like the thin screams of Jon’s little hawk daemon. The wolverine snarls back, and Daisy Tonner sneers.

"This one human?" she says, almost offhand, to Jon, and he jolts.

"What?"

" _Is he human?_ "

The wolverine looks up at him, at Mati, and Jon and his daemon both flinch.

"N-no, I, I don’t think so. Not anymore."

Tonner gives a _heh_ , darkly pleased. "And what’s it do?"

"Uh— he, he makes you feel— like you’re falling, and your daemon is going the other way. Uh… stretching, distance."

"Hm." The wolverine prowls a tight circle against the peregrine, which flaps slowly as she tries to regain her footing. Mike Crew, on the ground, gives a pathetic little groan. "He killed people?"

"Uh, y-yes. A few, I think."

"Okay."

And the wolverine lunges. Jon claps his hand over his choked little scream, and Mati is mantling on his arm, wings splayed and feathers bristling in desperate, defensive terror. The falcon struggles, long wings windmilling madly, as the wolverine’s teeth close over its throat. It shakes the bird like a ragdoll, flings it to the ground with little flurries of gold Dust in the air like sprays of blood.

"Lottie," says Tonner. "Let’s get him to the car, first."

The wolverine releases its— her?— prey, and stalks reluctantly away. Jon takes a few hurried steps back, but Tonner’s gaze snaps to him, and the hunger in her eyes matches the look on her daemon.

"You’re helping me move him. Don’t try to run."

He doesn’t try to run.

At least, when he’s crammed into her car with the dazed and bleeding body of Mike Crew, the wolverine is too busy keeping hold of the mostly-unconscious falcon to pay them much mind. Jon clutches Mati to his chest, just in case.

In the end, Tonner walks them out into the forest. She has a gun. Jon keeps looking at it, or Mati does, while Jon hauls the body of Mike Crew— not easy, even if the man is, by some miracle, _smaller than Jon_ — and Tonner’s wolverine drags the peregrine along by a wing. It looks painful, and makes Jon-and-Mati cringe at every jostle.

They stop a long way from the road. Jon is trying not to hyperventilate. Mati keeps looking at that gun.

"This is it," says Tonner, and she hefts Jon’s pack off her shoulder. Crouches to root through it, while her wolverine— Lottie— drops the peregrine and regards her with disgust.

"Weird markings," she says to her human. Daisy grunts affirmation, and spares a glance down at the peregrine in disgust. Jon, despite himself, makes a little sound— maybe protest, maybe questioning— and she flicks that look up at him, instead.

"It’s how you can tell," she says, and suddenly she is looking much too intently at Mati. "There’s always something _off_ about ‘em."

"Not Mati," says Jon, voice small. "T-there’s nothing wrong with Mati. You can see."

Tonner curls her lip, and the wolverine growls. Jon swallows hard, and does not protest when she returns to picking over his meagre pack.

She flicks through this belongings, but stops when she finds the tape recorder, already gently whirring.

"You sneaky little freak!" She looks up again, and this time the eager violence in her eyes makes Jon’s blood go cold. "Thought you’d record this?"

"N-no! I just—" He gestures desperately, trying to placate. The wolverine is bristling, seeming somehow more massive, more like a bear with flattened ears and too-long claws. "Are— are you going to kill us?"

Her lip lifts in a snarl, baring teeth.

"Lottie," she says. And the wolverine pounces.

Jon recoils, Mati fluttering in panic, but the wolverine hasn’t lunged at _them_. Instead, she’s descended upon the peregrine with jaws snapping. The bird lifts a wing in a slow, dizzy struggle, but it stands no chance at all: the wolverine’s jaws close around its neck again, and this time, it doesn’t hold back.

The peregrine bursts to gold Dust by the second snapping shake of the head.

Jon screams. Mati is a flurry of terrified movement against him, alighting on his shoulder, his head, trying to be high enough not to catch but still _close_ enough to press against him. If they’re about to die, they— they don’t want to be separate, he wants to hold her, she wants to feel the warmth of him—

When the wolverine advances, Jon is nearly sobbing with fear. Tonner levels the gun at him, then scoffs and stows it. She draws Jon’s dull old pocketknife, instead.

He doesn’t really stand a chance at running. At his panicked little backwards stagger, the wolverine slinks behind his ankles, and he scrambles not to trip over her and make contact. Insane, isn’t it, flinching from taboo now? But it’s an instinctive thing, a flinch he can’t help any more than his whimper when Tonner grabs him by the throat.

She presses his own pocketknife to his throat, hard enough to draw blood and then harder still, and Mati flutters feebly at her.

"Don’t make me touch her," Tonner growls, and her grip tightens. The knife presses deeper _into his throat_ , he can feel it as a blinding line of pain like fire, enough to nearly eclipse the whole world. "Be quicker if she comes down, lets Lottie do this bit."

Jon struggles out something, some protest, some _no._ No, no, she can’t have Mati. No one can have Mati. She—

She is their braver half, apparently. The little hawk launches herself at Tonner, actual _human_ Tonner, scrabbling for her eyes.

Tonner swings out hard and smacks her out of the air. The instant’s contact is enough to jolt the breath out of Jon and the sense out of Mati, and then the wolverine is upon her and everything whites out panic and pain. Mati, pinned to the dirt as the wolverine rakes massive clawed paws across her little wings, flaps feebly and screams a hawk’s thin scream.

"Daisy!"

Basira Hussain, thank god, thank _god_ , stands at the mouth of the clearing and does not look like she wants Jon to die. Her lizard is, for the first time in memory, _not_ half-hidden in her collar or among the folds of her hijab: she is in the grass ahead of Basira, looking intently at Tonner’s wolverine.

Daisy’s grip loosens. The wolverine looks back.

"You been following me, Basira?" she says.

"You’re not that subtle," says Basira. "And this is too far. You know it is."

The moment Jon realizes he might not die is the moment the wolverine steps off his daemon. Lottie moves: not a pounce, not a prowl, but a frustrated little _pace_ back and forth in the grass. Finally, with a growl, she slouches over to Basira’s lizard and leans her head low to speak in hushed murmurs.

Tonner’s grip loosens a _lot_ , after that.

It is enough that Mati picks herself up off the grass, wings aching and feathers raked up in messy claw-lines. Jon is still acutely aware of the body of Mike Crew, cooling nearby, without a daemon at all. The peregrine is simply gone.

He never knew how long it takes, even with three people and the massive paws of a wolverine, to dig a shallow grave.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content warnings for this chapter:**  
>  \- Canon-typical murder  
> \- Threats with guns  
> \- Daemon violence
> 
>  **Spoilers in this chapter:**  
>  \- Refers to events through 091.
> 
>  **Daemons in this chapter:**  
>  \- Jon's Eurasian sparrowhawk ( _Accipiter nisus_ ) Mati - Sanskrit for _intelligence/understanding_ , and a Greek term for the evil eye.  
> \- Mike Crew’s peregrine falcon ( _Falco peregrinus_ ) - To see her markings, look up Julia sets.  
> \- Daisy Tonner’s wolverine ( _Gulo gulo_ ) - Lottie, for a variety of lavender.  
> \- Basira Hussain’s Dampier monitor lizard ( _Varanus sparnus_ ) - Aadila, meaning _one who acts with justice and fairness_.


	5. (stranger) i can't trust anyone or anything these days

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Be aware of the content warnings on this one, folks.

Of all Mati’s scars, this is the one they flinch from the most. On the rare nights he remembers to sleep in a proper bed, not the cot in the Archives, Jon curls carefully around her and she settles into among his arms. He feels the softness of her feathers brushing his face, and they both try not to notice the bare patch.

"It might grow back," she murmurs to him, in the darkness, one night. "The worm damage grew back."

"Not all the way," he answers. "And it won’t."

They both know it won’t. They should be glad, Jon knows, that her wing feathers are still intact, and her sleek barred tail. It doesn’t matter for flight, doesn’t register to passersby at a glance, that she is missing a stretch of grey coverts just behind the nape of her neck.

Still. They notice the absence, and they can’t help but remember.

He should have expected it from the start. From the moment Breeken & Hope stepped out onto the street, horrifying in their _sameness_ , impossible to tell daemon from person. (Neither of them is the daemon, he knows, and hates it; they are both simply _halves_ , unlabeled.) One part of them, Breekon-or-Hope, wrenched Jon’s arms behind his back to drag him, kicking and spluttering, into the van.

The other part, also Breekon-or-Hope, reached out towards Mati as she fluttered panicked circles around them. She didn’t even try to dodge, really. They didn’t know she would have to.

They didn’t expect Breekon-or-Hope to snatch her out of the air. Not really. For all that either half could be a daemon, either half could be something like _human_ , and it just seemed— they hadn’t expected. They hadn’t thought.

Breekon-or-Hope’s hands had been just human enough to be horrible.

Mati gave a desperate hawk’s cry, too anguished for human sound, and did not struggle. Every finger pressed against her little feathery body was thick, meaty, _wrong._ Shoved half into a van, Jon went rigid and then limp with the sensation of it, overwhelmed, and tried not to be sick. His vision spotted black. Breekon-or-Hope manhandled him the rest of the way in, and he curled dizzily onto his side, reaching feebly for his daemon.

One half of Breekon-or-Hope urged the van to life. The other half of Breekon-or-Hope held Mati in his two bulky palms, wings pinned to her sides, and held her the whole way there.

Jon is fairly sure he passed out early into the drive. He didn’t have that mercy again.

They at least released her once they got him in the chair. He remembers very little of being tied up: there had been conversation, the plodding disinterest of Breekon & Hope, the lilting giggle of Nikola Orsinov. He’d flinched from the sound of her, but by then they had already dragged heavy cloth across his eyes. Those horrible thick fingers had secured it behind his head, tangled with his hair.

For Mati, something similar: those bulky fingers jammed a little leather hood onto her head. This roused her enough to recoil, blinded and horrified, but they only yanked the straps shut. She reeled in those heavy hands, blind as a falconer’s bird.

The _relief_ , when they threw her into his lap, was like that of a man in the desert putting water to his lips. Mati pressed herself close against his throat, flapping clumsily to keep from falling, and he’d curled around her as best he could. They huddled there together, whispering to each other in half-speech and half-thought, even as they bound his hands.

 _I’m here, I’m okay, I’m here,_ she thought to him. A steady stream of murmuring, meaningless reassurance.

 _If they try to take you again I will bite them_ , he thought back, shaking with how intensely he meant it and how afraid he was that it wouldn’t be _enough_.

And it hadn’t been.

"Oh, _Archivist,_ " Orsinov cooed to him, as though he was a funny little animal behaving poorly in her care. "You really _must_ take better care of your _skin!_ "

Her fingers were not like Breekon & Hope’s: they were slick and segmented, plasticky and strange. She giggled at his shudders and rubbed those probing, awful fingertips down his cheeks, slick with something that might have been lotion or might have been blood.

He tried to lean away from her touch, but she only tutted and followed him. Her fingers skated down his bared throat, pressed into the dip of his clavicle. He choked helplessly, tensed against the restraints, and Mati lashed out.

They knew it was stupid. They just— there wasn’t a _choice_.

(There’s always a choice, Jonathan Sims has come to realize.)

Nikola gasped her exaggerated surprise as the hawk scratched and clutched at her plastic hands. The sensation was horrible, and made Jon reel even secondhand: Mati’s tiny talons broke _into_ something too slick to be skin, not brittle enough to be a mannequin’s plastic. Nikola’s not-skin gave way immediately, like warm, thick cellophane.

And Nikola said, " _Well_. That’s _very_ rude!"

And then she picked Mati up.

Jon did not scream, exactly, but he groaned through the gag. Mati fluttered, spasming against the sense of _intrusion,_ and then went still.

"You know," trilled Nikola, "I think she would make a _very_ lovely hat. The feathers! So charming."

She shifted Mati into one hand, stiff palm and uncanny fingers. Mati gave a weak, sluggish flap, then abandoned the effort when Nikola reached for her. She pinned her wings desperately to her sides, trembling terror all through Jon’s mind.

"It would take some time," hummed Nikola, "using all these little ones."

And she took her fingertips to the grey, sleek coverts at the nape of Mati’s neck, between her shoulderblades. Easy as anything, she plucked one.

Jon jolted in his restraints as though struck. Mati gave a pathetic little chirping noise. 

Nikola clucked her probably-nonexistent tongue.

"Such _fuss_." She reached for another feather, tugged it free. And another. Jon shook in his chair, moaning gently, and the thoughts between him and his daemon blurred into an unintelligible shared stream of _nonononono_.

Nikola had a little handful of hawk-feathers before she stopped with a grandiose sigh.

 _"My_ , Archivist! He really hasn’t raised you well at _all_. We’ll have to have more words with our dear Elias. Do you call him Elias?" Another musical little hum, thoughtful and amused, and without ceremony she threw his daemon down onto his lap again. Jon gasped and curled around her, and Mati squirmed awkwardly upright so that she could press herself back to his chest.

"Very _well_. We can pluck her at the same time we peel _you!_ We’ll get all the complaining out of the way at the same time. Isn’t that a _nice_ favor I’ve done you, Archivist?"

Still tutting, she swept out again. He thought so, anyway. Difficult to track footsteps in that place, where time and space were… questionable.

He didn’t know how long the reprieve until Michael came. Maybe seconds, maybe hours. He _does_ know that the laugh Michael gave, looking at the scattered hawk-feathers on the ground, had been all astonishment and not a scrap of pity.

They try not to think about that. They fail with terrible regularity.

They also try not to think about the logistics of _a daemon-feather hat_. At what point do the feathers dissolve to Dust? Surely the point would be moot when he died, presuming the skinning killed him.

(Some months later, gazing upon the wailing choir, he realizes: oh. The skinning was never _supposed_ to kill him. Orsinov would have worn his daemon for her dance.)

(Months _further_ , in a cozy cabin in Scotland, in that sliver of time before the whole thing goes to hell, Martin’s eyes are wide with reverence as Mati presses herself to his hands. He touches gentle fingers to the fluff between her shoulderblades, and Jon sees the shift in his eyes when he brushes that little bare spot.

"It’s alright," croaks Jon, his voice thick with the warmth of being _held_. Martin’s fingers are soft and real and nothing, _nothing_ , like the Circus. "We’re alright."

"You’re _amazing,_ " Martin breathes, to the both of them, and his kiss is very warm and very human.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content warnings for this chapter:**  
>  \- Nonconsensual daemon touching  
> \- Violence against daemons  
> \- Captivity and restraint  
> \- Nonconsensual touch (nonsexual, but intimate)
> 
>  **Spoilers in this chapter:**  
>  \- Through 101
> 
>  **Daemons in this chapter:**  
>  \- Jon's Eurasian sparrowhawk ( _Accipiter nisus_ ) Mati - Sanskrit for _intelligence/understanding_ , and a Greek term for the evil eye.  
> 


	6. (spiral) the sky was falling and time was bending

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all SO much for the support!! We'll keep chugging along with daily updates for as long as my will holds out. I will, at some point, get us back into chronological order. Probably.

When she stumbled into his office, Helen Richardson’s daemon had been a monkey. He doesn’t know the exact species— Jon has always been better with identification of avian forms, and even insects, which impresses people— but he was something small, with glossy fur already rumpled into odd angles. As Helen drew her erratic map, he skittered to and fro around her feet, climbing and descending the back of her chair.

It hurt to watch, seeing a daemon driven mad. How would he _not_ pity her?

Mati had fluttered to the edge of that chair and looked down at that trembling daemon. He had looked up, eyes bright with a manic energy, and done nothing but shake.

"It will be alright," Mati said softly, just to him. He didn’t say anything in return.

It is a long time later that Jon sees her daemon again, and he never again sees the monkey.

When the Distortion’s door creaks opens into that hellish, darkened room of waxworks, with Jon bound and trembling in the chair, some tiny and stupid cornr of his heart thinks it might be a rescue.

"Oh, Archivist. It’s almost sad to see you like this."

He realizes immediately it is a gloating session, instead.

He holds still as best he can while Michael slides a long, sharp finger between the curve of Jon’s jaw and the gag. The fabric splits with a tug, and the blindfold follows.

He stares, panting to keep his breathing under control, into the face of Michael. Michael stares back, with wide dark eyes in a colour that makes Jon’s head hurt, and somehow he doesn’t need to move behind Jon to slice the rope around his arms. Disorienting. Jon swallows hard and uses his newly-freed hands, aching and prickling from disuse, to gather Mati close against his chest.

Michael allows him enough time to loosen the little falconry hood and yank it off his daemon’s head. She tucks herself desperately against his hands, even with them still cold and shaking, and murmurs a tearful stream of reassurances in his mind.

_It’s okay, I’m okay, I’m here, I’m here..._

When he looks up again, he realizes Michael is still staring. Watching him— watching _them._

"I’ve come to a decision," lilts Michael, when he notices Jon looking at him. He tilts his head, as though considering them from another angle. Then the smile spreads across his face, too-wide and too-sharp. "I’m going to kill you."

He can’t help his little groan. (Mati notes, in the back of their head, that freeing his hands so he could hold his daemon is not a _necessary_ kindness.)

"Before I do, however, I want you to understand..." Michael sighs, theatrically, "even if it does go against my nature. So."

Abruptly he is very close, and Jon is looking into the impossibly-coloured faceted depths of his eyes.

"Ask your questions."

So he asks. He asks _how did you find me_ , and _what do you have to do with the Unknowing_ , and— finally, pointlessly, just because he has to _know_ —

"What happened to your daemon?"

Michael goes very still, at that. Even the erratic motion of his hair, the way it seems to flow as though underwater, loses some of that curling drift. In his chair, Jon squirms, and Mati tucks herself small into the shelter of his hands.

They have known it since Sasha’s first encounter: Michael does not have a daemon. He is tall, impossibly-proportioned, distorted like a figure in a funhouse mirror, and _he does not have a daemon_. That is how they know he is a monster, worse even than Prentiss. Similar in scale to Nikola Orsinov, perhaps, with the horrible little plastic animals she drags around as though they have souls.

But Michael, very softly, _sighs_.

"I am Michael. I was not _always_ Michael. I do not want to _be_ Michael. Michael had a human soul. Her name was Elizabeth."

Jon stiffens, at that. In his hands, Mati has gone very still.

"I still have her, Archivist. Would you like to see?"

And the door creaks open.

The thing that comes out is not a dog. It is perhaps the right size to be a dog, if he doesn’t think about it too long. It has hooves, or perhaps those are heavy, blunt claws; its neck is far, far too long. There might be scales. There might be hair. When it turns its horrible head to look at them, Mati whimpers faintly.

Looking at the daemon makes Jon’s head hurt, which he imagines is rather the _point_ , and yet he can’t stop trying to decipher the shape.

"Elizabeth," Michael says again, and his voice is strained over some kind of emotion Jon could not begin to classify. The thing slinks closer, presses herself to Michael’s leg in some parody of a dog’s lean-hug.

"What was she?" chokes Jon, who for some godforsaken reason has to _know_.

MichaeI _hmm_ s. "She was a border collie."

He reaches down with those cutting fingers and cards them through her fur. The ruined daemon trembles against him, and sighs some little scrap of language that doesn’t quite resolve into anything.

For just a moment, the expression on Michael’s face is enough to twist a hot flare of pity in Jon’s chest.

He says, softly, "What happened?"

And Michael tells him.

In the end, it is only Jon and Michael and what is left of their daemons, alone among the waxworks. The rain falls outside, and distantly, in some far-off room, the coffin moans.

Michael smiles that too-wide, too-sharp smile, and waits politely for Jon to be ready to die. Jon is not ready to die. He can feel the fluttering of his daemon’s heart against his fingers, through the fluff of her breast. Some of her feathers are still on the floor; he wonders when they will dissolve to Dust, and whether they will at all. He wonders how much she’s already changed.

Maybe it’s better, to die like this, with her still a hawk against his hands. Maybe it’s better not to see the misshapen thing she would become.

Jon takes a shaking breath, and rattles it out again. Michael’s smile grows.

"Okay," he says. And, gingerly, unsteadily, he gets out of the chair. He steps to the door. Michael and his daemon move politely aside, just watching. (Elizabeth’s eyes are glossy and distant.)

Jon turns the handle.

The lock clicks.

He tries again. And again. Mati shifts against his hand, restless, wanting to go inspect the thing but unwilling to be apart from him if they’re _actually_ about to die. Michael’s smile has frozen, gone slanted with some kind of tension Jon doesn’t know how to name.

"It’s locked," he says.

"It can’t be," says Michael.

Jon turns to watch the realization dawning across his face. The Distortion’s horrible fingers are in his daemon’s fur, clutching her scruff as though he is just a man and she is just a dog.

"Oh," breathes Michael, tightening his fingers, and Elizabeth presses herself more desperately to his leg. "Oh, no."

And then the door opens.

What happens next does not, of course, make sense: there is no burst of golden Dust, there is no instant of clear and unquestionable death. Michael simply _screams_ , distorted, warping higher and tinny like something mechanical, and Elizabeth goes _wrong._

Well. Elizabeth was already, emphatically, wrong. Elizabeth goes _different_.

When Jon looks behind him into the room of waxworks, Michael is no longer there, and the creature still remaining is not a dog. It is not even a muddled parody of a dog. It is, he thinks, distantly, the most beautiful and horrifying monkey that has ever existed.

He had been sleek, before, though rumpled by panic and confusion. Now, ever hair refracts light into dizzying fractals. His eyes are brilliant in every colour that has never existed. His tail curls in on itself endlessly, a shape that goes on and on and on.

The monkey watches Jon and Mati, bright with interest, as Helen opens the door.

"Do you want to come in?" she says, not unkindly.

Many months later, he meets the Distortion and her daemon again. Basira watches, expression flat as ever. Whenever that yellow door opens, Jon cannot help but look for the monkey. Sometimes Helen appears with him; sometimes without. She seems terribly ambivalent about it.

"Does he matter to you?" he interrupts, halfway into a petty argument about humanity and identity. "Her daemon. I never learned his name."

"His name is David, Archivist," she says, ever so patiently. "And he is still David, the way I am still Helen. He’s simply… _different_ , now. As we all are."

That last bit pointedly. Jon bristles, Mati on his shoulder. The marks on her breast, the little horizontal lines of barring, look like narrow eyes. He knows the others see it. He knows it isn’t _right_ , any more than Helen’s distorted and fractalline monkey.

Perhaps any more than Michael’s warped and broken dog.

"Why don’t you keep him with you?" he demands, and she _sighs_.

"Archivist," she says, as though speaking to a terribly stupid and stubborn young child. "He _is_ with me. I am more than this body. I am more than those hallways. I do not have to be just _one thing_ , Archivist. If you could understand that, or perhaps give up on so madly _trying_ to understand it, I think you would be a great deal better off."

His mouth twists with frustration. She sighs, as though she actually _cares_. As though she isn’t the thing that stole a woman’s daemon, no better than the Not-Them.

Sometimes, Jon wonders what that makes him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content warnings for this chapter:**  
>  \- Canon-typical Distortion weirdness
> 
> **Spoilers in this chapter:**  
>  \- Refers to events through 101.
> 
> **Daemons in this chapter:**  
>  \- Jon's Eurasian sparrowhawk ( _Accipiter nisus_ ) Mati - Sanskrit for _intelligence/understanding_ , and a Greek term for the evil eye.  
> \- Michael’s border collie ( _Canis familiaris_ ) Elizabeth - for a character in Shelley’s _Frankenstein_.  
> \- Helen’s brown spider monkey ( _Ateles hybridus_ ) David - I am assured this is a Stella Firma reference.


	7. (end) omens and all kinds of signs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here, take something small and sad before we ramp back up into pain.
> 
> I'm getting increasingly oblique with chapter titles. Spot the lyrics!

They found Mati beneath his crumpled body, in the ruins of the wax museum. He is told this after the fact, in his hospital bed, with the little sparrowhawk nestled against his chest. It’s how they knew he wasn’t all the way dead yet, despite the lack of heartbeat; it’s the reason he landed in a hospital instead of in a morgue.

When he wakes, though, things are different. He is different. _Mati_ is different.

Jon lies in his hospital bed and combs his fingertips through her feathers, the way he has a thousand times before. The colour of her barring is a little different, now: less a rusty orange, more the brown-red of bloodstains. And the shape is very different. Those little horizontal tickmarks had been neat and simple, before; natural.

Now there is a white fleck inside each one, like a pupil in negative. Each little mark gives the distinct impression of a thin, staring eye.

"Oh, Jon," she sighs to him.

Her eyes have gone darker, too. They had been amber, striking and pretty and perhaps a bit too intense. That is too gentle a word for them, now. There are _depths_ in those eyes that are not human. They are vast and layered and endless and awful. It is a whole sky’s worth of eyes. It is an infinity’s worth of attention, looking out of his daemon at him.

"It’s still me," she says.

"No," he says. "No, I don’t think it is."

They both know it could be worse.

Because: they remember Chicago, Trevor’s rasping laugh, Julia’s smile. They remember the way the Hunters shied away from the Skin Book to leave him alone, unsupervised, with the ghost of Gerard Keay. He’d been confused, then, by why they’d grant him such freedom and privacy. He hadn’t understood the fear and disgust on their faces.

He understood the moment he called Gerry forward.

Well. What was left of him.

"It _hurts_ ," said Gerry, tone flat and voice eerily resonant. "Being like this. Being..."

 _Without her_ , he didn’t say, but Jon could fill in the gaps. Mati hunkered down low on his shoulder, one wing pressed to his neck. He tried to pretend he wasn’t leaning into the contact, too, desperate for the reassurance. Because the man in front of them was only half a man. He was Gerry Keay with no bird on his shoulder, Gerry Keay with not the faintest flicker or shuffle of movement to mirror his own. Gerry Keay _alone_.

His daemon had been some kind of crow, Jon was fairly sure. Big and black and clever. Female, he suspected, though none of the statements actually confirmed it. Perhaps he shouldn’t assume.

By the end of their conversation, he didn’t have to assume. Gerry said, "I’m done," and the expression on his face was so raw Jon wanted to look away. (He didn’t. He never does, these days. Perhaps it’s against his nature.) "I’m done being kept apart from Lenore. Hide my page, and when you’re out of here, burn it."

There was an awful little pause before he said, "Please."

What could Jon possibly say to that?

It was much later that he held that horrible, heavy parchment, spiderweb lighter in hand. It made his whole arm shake. He had made a promise, and he intended to carry through, but— but the _information_ held here, the things Gerard Keay could tell him—

Mati said, "Let him be with his daemon, Jon."

In the end, that’s what did it. He held the lighter to the parchment and grit his teeth against the pain until the page had well and truly caught.

It didn’t go up in golden Dust, or any such thing, but he likes to think the man ended up in the right place. That wherever daemons go, that’s where he is, too. Even if it’s just… nothingness. The absence of pain.

Later, in his hospital bed, with his fingers in his daemon’s changed feathers, Jon thinks about the choice he's just made. Wonders if he's made the right one. Perhaps absence of pain wouldn’t have been so bad. He could have chosen to rest, like Gerry.

"There's nothing to do but go forward," says Mati, still huddled small against him. Her voice only wavers a little. "We’re the Archivist, now. Properly, I mean."

He still has her. She’s not a warped and terrible dog-thing, trying not to _be_ , like Michael’s daemon. She’s still beautiful, like this, even if she is also terrifying.

"But I don’t know if you’re _you_ ," Jon admits, small and quiet under the white fluorescent lights. "I don’t know if I’m still _me._ "

"Whoever we are," she says, "we made our choice. Now we’re going to live it."

"That sounds terrible."

"Then we’ll do it together."

Alone in his hospital bed, Jon holds his changed daemon and cries. He does not know if it is relief or mourning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content warnings for this chapter:**  
>  \- Discussions of death
> 
>  **Spoilers in this chapter:**  
>  \- Refers to events in 111, 117, and 121.
> 
>  **Daemons in this chapter:**  
>  \- Jon's Eurasian sparrowhawk ( _Accipiter nisus_ ) Mati - Sanskrit for _intelligence/understanding_ , and a Greek term for the evil eye.  
> \- Gerry’s carrion crow ( _Corvus corone_ ) Lenore - for a character in a certain Poe poem; someone beloved, now lost.


	8. (slaughter) don't feel alive if i ain't in the fight

Melanie looks very small when she’s asleep. Her daemon curls against her chest, small and soft instead of a whirling thing of teeth and tiny claws. They both breathe peacefully, her chest rising slowly against his furry little body.

"You’re sure about this?" says Basira, her daemon on her shoulder, and Jon gives a thin sigh. Mati has already fluttered to the edge of the cot to observe the sleeping Melanie-and-Bachman.

"I am," he says, and readies the scalpel.

They get the bullet out. He can see it the whole time, or maybe Mati can; their senses blur, in moments like this, both of them _Seeing_ as one being that is not human and has far more than four eyes.

So. They get the bullet out.

Melanie’s daemon comes awake screaming at precisely the same moment she does.

"Melanie!" He tries to scramble back, out of her range; Basira lunges forward. Her Aadila is too small to be any help against a furious stoat, though, and Bachman _lunges_ for Mati in a way that makes Jon’s stomach drop.

When Bachman gets his teeth in Mati’s leg, she shrieks a hawk’s thin scream. Jon, mad with panic, swats at the daemon barehanded. Bachman detaches to duck the swipe, and hisses at him, wild-eyed with fury.

Melanie’s screech of rage is _ear-splitting._

Even Jon can realize when to cut his losses. He runs.

He doesn't think much of it, at the time— Bachman's lunge or Melanie's shriek. He writes both off as the influence of the Slaughter. He only finds out later, from a tape, what was done to her:

"Your father was your last real anchor, wasn’t he?"

Elias smiled at her. Gentle, paternal, _smug._ Around his neck hung the little case for an insect daemon to shelter in. Not plastic, but proper colored glass, something _sleek_ and _expensive_.

Melanie bristled harder under his stare. Bachman was ahead of her: sat on the asshole’s desk, glaring into his eyes from close up, already all teeth. Elias was making a fantastic show of not minding the intimidation attempt at all.

"None of your business," spat Melanie. Elias’s smile _widened._

"He always remembered you, didn’t he? _Little moth._ That was Bachman’s favored form, wasn’t it, when you were young?"

"Shut up!"

"Funny, isn’t it? He’d thought you would grow into something delicate and beautiful. Look how you’ve turned out, instead."

She rose from the chair, snarling. Bachman stalked forward, crouched and bristling and _very_ sharp. Elias looked, if anything, pleased.

"Do you want to know what really killed him?"

He moved before she expected it. She hadn’t— she wouldn’t— there’s no way she would expect—

His long fingers closed, ever so gently, over the scruff of Bachman’s tiny neck. The stoat tried to scrabble back, wild-eyed with shock, but it was too late.

Elias smiled. She crumpled quickly once he began to pour memory into her, connected by the horrible unwanted heat of his fingers in her daemon’s fur. Bachman squealed and _squirmed_.

And then Elias let him go.

"Will that be sufficient?" he asked, so very politely. "We can stop here, and I can promise not to make it worse."

She choked on a sob. Bachman scrambled backwards, staggering as though dazed, and Melanie swept him into her arms. She hunched around her daemon, shaking and defensive, like a wounded animal.

"Take it back," she gritted. "The— the memory, take it _back._ "

"That’s not really something I can do," he simpered. "But I am glad to see we are done here."

She launched herself at him with a ragged scream.

He was ready for her. Elias leaned back and away, and when her hands came at him, weaponless but _clawed_ , ready to rip and tear with just her fingernails, he caught her wrists. She got in a vicious scratch down the length of his forearm, and snapped at him like a rabid animal, and his expression pulled into a tense grimace as he tried to fend her off. He was tall, and strong, but he was not fueled by the light of _rage_.

And he wasn’t expecting the lengths she’d go to, in her frenzy.

Bachman vaulted the table in two bounds and tackled Elias full in the chest. The man gave a strangled cry of shock and released Melanie to scramble back, nearly falling over his chair, as the stoat latched onto his neck like a lamprey. He swatted at the daemon, and Bachman released him only to snap at his insect-lanyard, instead.

When Elias finally managed to recoil, stumbling back and knocking the chair over, Bachman hit the ground with the lanyard in his teeth.

The coloured glass case cracked when it hit the ground. Funny— they’re not supposed to. Not the new sort. Only the really old, really stupid antique kind shatter from that kind of fall.

Bachman took it in his jaws and chomped _down_ , glass splintering under his teeth. Melanie grunted against the secondhand pain.

Elias, vest mussed and breathing harder now, raised an eyebrow at them.

The case comes to pieces. There was nothing inside.

Melanie’s breath hitched. Bachman took a horrified little step back.

"If you are _quite_ finished," said Elias.

She stared at him, chest heaving, hands shaking, daemon by her ankles. He stared levelly back, alone.

"Good," he said, finally. "If that is all, Miss King? I believe, other than the topics discussed, your performance has been..." His smile was all teeth. "Satisfactory."

(Much later, Jon hears another tape: a short fragment of conversation, Melanie talking in furious undertones.

"It’ll be bad," she is saying. "Like— really bad."

"I can take it," says Martin.

"He," she says, and stops. "He might—" and stops again.

"Melanie," says Martin, soft and slow.

"He might touch," Melanie starts, and breaks off. Martin’s little intake of breath is very clearly audible, on the tape. So is the silence that stretches, after.

"Okay," he says.

Jon tries not to think about that. Jon often fails.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content warnings for this chapter:**  
>  \- Mention of nonconsensual amateur surgery  
> \- Nonconsensual daemon-touching  
> \- Daemons attacking humans  
> \- Canon-typical Elias Bouchard
> 
>  **Spoilers in this chapter:**  
>  \- Refers to events through 125.
> 
>  **Daemons in this chapter:**  
>  \- Jon's Eurasian sparrowhawk ( _Accipiter nisus_ ) Mati - Sanskrit for _intelligence/understanding_ , and a Greek term for the evil eye.  
> \- Melanie King’s stoat ( _Mustela erminea_ ) - Bachman, a pen name of Stephen King. Did you know stoats can kill prey ten times their size?  
> \- Elias’s notable lack of a daemon. Wonder why that could be!


	9. (flesh) throw my bones in a hole in the ground

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Few updates, folks:  
> 1\. I've bumped our rating up to Mature to account for the inherent sexual/intimate undertones in daetouching scenes, and, you know, all the canon-typical horror.  
> 2\. This chapter contains the most intense daetouching scene, so mind the warnings.  
> 3\. This work is now part of a series! I wrote y'all some gratuitous lonelyeyes to go with this fic. Please enjoy.

Of all the Fears that deal with daemons— which is, by nature, all of them, because fear for self and soul are so closely tied as to be inextricable— among the most bizarrely focused is the Flesh. The Hunt deals often with the killing of daemons, but the Flesh is most brazen and horrific in addressing their _butchering._

So it is with a certain shake in his hands that Jon goes to meet Jared Hopworth, the Boneturner.

The man’s daemon had been some kind of boar, once. Jon is sure of this because it had been mentioned in the statements, and not because he can actually make out much of anything under all the… mess.

Hopworth’s daemon is massive. ( _A proper monster pig,_ whispers Mati in his mind, half-hysterical amusement behind it, and he shushes her with a furious little brush of thought.) She must have bristled with coarse red hair, once, but now her body is armored with sharp, jutting shapes. The pieces can be as thick as Jon's wrist or as slim as one of Mati’s little toes, and the color makes nausea rise in the base of Jon’s throat.

Living bones are not perfectly white, Jon is aware. They are a dirty-looking pale color, instead, when they’re still flush with blood.

The monster before him is encrusted in slivers and shards of living bone. He wonders, almost idly, how deep they go. What the _inside_ of her looks like.

He wonders, and wishes he didn’t, where the bones came from.

 _What’s it feel like?_ whispers Mati, _To put a person’s bones inside your daemon?_

"Don’t be crass," he snaps at her, shocked into saying it aloud. The sound in his head is very nearly a laugh, in reply, but it’s a nervous one.

Jared Hopworth and his boar are looking at them. At least, Jon thinks so; it’s difficult to make out eyes among the mass that is Jared Hopworth. The effect of a face is somewhat lost among all the… meat.

"What do you want?" drawls the monster, slow and deep and half-smothered by _meaty_ sounds. There is an awful clicking and popping to it. Mati crowds against Jon’s neck, almost _tired_ in her fear, and Jon swallows hard to find his voice.

"I, uh..." The boar is moving forward, and it takes all Jon’s will not to step back in time. But she only peers up at him and at Mati, eyes relatively unobscured. Maybe she’s their better half at seeing, these days. Maybe there is too much _meat_ in the way for Jared to be much good at it. Jon, faltering, addresses the daemon instead. "I’m here to ask a favour?"

"Favour," rumbles Hopworth. "For letting me out?"

"Ah— yes."

"Hm." Hopworth cocks his head, but it is a slow moving, a gradual shifting of meat. Jon is, again, distinctly nauseous. Mati tells him _steady, come on_ in the back of his head, and he leans desperately into the soft weight of her against his neck. "Alright. Am I puttin’ somethin’ in, or takin’ something out?"

Jon breathes carefully. "Taking something out. Just— a rib? Something I won’t miss."

"Hm." The thing that is Jared Hopworth nods, slow and laborious. "Done."

He steps forward. His step goes _schlorp._ Jon can’t help himself, and jolts back a little step, which disturbs Mati on his shoulder.

"And I— I want to know. Why did you attack us?"

"Hm." This time Hopworth leans _in_ , and for all that his expression is barely visible beyond the protruding bits of flesh, Jon is certain he’s leering. "Was asked. You want a statement, it’ll cost another rib."

"Alright."

"One of _hers._ "

One meaty, distorted arm comes up. Several fingers extend, with a horrible little series of popping joints and shifting cartilage.

He is, Jon realizes, pointing at Mati.

"Wh— _no_." He recoils on instant, hand coming up to shelter the little bird against his neck. " _What?_ "

Hopworth shrugs, and cracking pops cascade down his meaty body. "‘S for Galatea."

Jon shudders in revulsion, but Mati has gone very still on his shoulder. Held tight, feathers pressed in close against her body.

"I’ll do it," she says, just loud enough to be heard. Jon jumps.

"We will _not—_ "

"We will," she says. And he feels the press of _He would hurt us, he could hurt us, this is better. This is the way forward._

He doesn’t actually disagree.

Jon swallows hard against bile, still. "You— your daemon will, will take the bone?"

Jared’s head turns, again slow and _wet_. There is a sound coming from him, a sort of gurgling rumble— Jon realizes, with an abrupt bolt of horror, that it is laughter.

"Nah. It’ll be me. Thumbs, and all." He holds up his mess of fingers, too many of them, to demonstrate. "But I’ll make it quick."

Jon does not think there is overt cruelty in that voice. Just… disinterest. Not, not _enjoyment_ of— of reaching into his _soul_ and—

He swallows against a gag. Mati digs her tiny talons into his shoulder.

"Fine," he says. "Statement first."

And Jared Hopworth tells them a story.

In the end, Jon stands shaking and still holding his daemon to him. He is sated, he is _thrilling_ with the memory of snapping and popping and flesh, but— but now—

"Hardly worth a daemon’s rib," he spits. Hopworth grunts and _looms_ forward, and it takes all Jon’s willpower— and a fierce, puncturing squeeze from his daemon— not to flinch away. "Fine!"

His hands shake while he catches the hem of his shirt and jumper together, hauls them up to bare his chest. The humiliation of it is salt on the wound: the list of people who have seen Jon without a shirt on can be counted on one hand, and he knows his ribs stand out starkly. There hasn’t been much motivation to eat proper human food, for a while now. Longer than he’d care to admit.

Then he holds still. Even at Hopworth looms closer, even as the soft warm _meat_ of his hands— too many fingers, too many joints, popping _against Jon_ — settle against his chest. And begin to _push in._

He chokes on a gasp. He feels skin and nerves and blood vessels pushed aside, wrenched slowly and gradually out of place in a way that is _wrong_ , body screaming alarm. It is an intrusive pain that makes him _reel_ , makes him feel abruptly dizzy and as though he might need to vomit, anything to just— to get it _out._

Meaty fingers close around a rib. He whimpers through his teeth and tries not to sag overmuch against the warped arm, tries to stay on his feet while the world slowly spins. The sensation of _movement_ continues, slow and heavy, deep inside.

Then the arm withdraws. He gasps in agony and then relief as those thick, mangled fingers drag _out_ of him, and a piece of him goes with them.

Jared Hopworth holds up the rib.

"That’s one down."

Too much. Jon sways and goes to his knees, an awkward stumble, palms on the garish yellow of the Distortion’s floors. The tiles warp and shift before his eyes like funhouse mirrors, so he shuts his eyes hard and tries to breathe past the rushing in his ears.

Mati flutters, settles on his arched back. She looks up at Hopworth and his boar daemon, so tiny she might fit inside one of Hopworth’s lumpy and many-fingered palms.

"Second one, then," says Hopworth, and reaches for her.

Jon does retch, this time. Only brings up bile in the back of his throat. Hopworth’s fingers are too _big_ for this, he’ll stretch her fragile little body apart, he’ll _kill_ them—

He doesn’t. Mati splays her wings for balance, as though she’s a breath from taking off, and stays tremblingly still as the Boneturner reaches into her. There is pressure and pain and _intrusion_ , _wrongness_ , the live-wire agony of scraping raw nerves. Jon has tears hot in the corners of his eyes by the time that hand draws slowly out and free.

Mati is gasping, panting open-mouthed. Jared Hopworth is holding a tiny, delicate little rib between two fingers, slim as a toothpick.

Jon cannot watch as the thing turns to his daemon and _inserts_ it into her bristling hide. A dainty piece of Jon’s soul, now one more ugly fragment of the boar’s body.

"Huh," says Hopworth, after. "Alright. Weird one, that. Ours now."

God, it _hurts_. He can’t— they can’t— they can’t _feel_ the little hawk’s rib, but it’s, just, the _knowledge_ that a piece of his daemon is _inside…_

He gags again. Hopworth scoffs at him.

"You said I could leave."

"R-r… right." God, his voice shakes so badly. Jon gives up on it. _Mati,_ somehow, finds hers instead.

"Just go that way," she says, to the awful hulking thing that had just had its _hands_ in her _body._ "There will be a door."

"Better be," says Hopworth. And then, his boar bristling with stolen daemon-bones, he walks away.

Jon takes the opportunity to faint dead away.

When he comes to, Helen is there. Melanie is there. Mati is still tucked against his chest, safe even if she is not strictly _whole_. The thought is— he swallows it down. They’ll think about it later.

(They do not allow themselves to think about it until _much_ later, in the cabin, when Martin shifts his wide fingers against Mati’s breast _just so_ and Jon flinches as though struck. The rest is all hushed and fumbling apologies, Jon insisting it’s _fine_ , Mati saying nothing at all.

Even when Martin puts his smile back on, Brawne keeps looking at them with bright and worried eyes.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content warnings for this chapter:**  
>  \- Body horror; canon-typical Boneturning (reaching into and painfully distorting someone's body)  
> \- Intense daemon-touching with body horror components  
> \- Vomit mention (Jon gags in reaction to the above)
> 
>  **Spoilers in this chapter:**  
>  \- Refers to events through 131.
> 
>  **Daemons in this chapter:**  
>  \- Jon's Eurasian sparrowhawk ( _Accipiter nisus_ ) Mati - Sanskrit for _intelligence/understanding_ , and a Greek term for the evil eye.  
> \- Martin's European hare ( _Lepus europaeus_ ) Brawne - for the fiancée and muse of Keats.  
> \- Jared's wild boar ( _Sus scrofa_ ).  
> 


	10. (buried) laid him down in a grave in the sand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another rough one, because The Worms fucked me up real good and I had to share that joy with you. Mind the content warnings.

Mati crams herself into the collar of his shirt, in the Buried.

He loses track of where he ends and she begins: he is aware of her talons as pinpricks in his shoulder and the back of his neck, her hot little scaled legs. The fluff of her belly, the smooth edge of a wing. But these things all muddle together with the scrape of dirt against his hands and the smell of damp, dark soil.

He is trying not to panic. Seems to be a doomed effort. Panic is, after all, the _point._

"Just keep going," Mati whispers by his ear, her wings trembling against him with the urge to _fly_. This is not the kind of place a bird should tolerate; this is the worst kind of _trapped_ she could be, and he feels her instinctive animal-panic shivering hot in his mind alongside his own. Maybe the same as his own, even. There’s no real difference between them, down here, crammed so close together he itches for the sky as much as he generally itches for a Statement.

"I’m trying," he mutters back, and gets soil in his mouth for the effort. It is gritty and horrible, and he feels somehow that this is _grave-_ dirt, specifically. This is the crushing dark in which countless bodies are buried, most of them still screaming.

"Oh, so the dirt is _malevolent,_ " mutters Mati in his ear. "There’s a shock. Just keep going, Jonathan."

He cannot imagine what it would be like, trying to do this alone. When his hands shake against the close-pressed soil, pawing his way through the earth towards his goal, at least he can focus on the soft trembling of Mati in counterpoint. Her talons must be drawing blood in his shoulder, tight enough to bruise, but he is glad for it.

It gets worse.

Tighter, crushing, the walls of stone and soil pressing inexorably inward. He can no longer crawl forward on hands and knees. There’s no room; the dirt is hard-packed and right up against his cheeks. His mouth is nothing _but_ grit, now. He is choking on lumps of stale grave dirt.

Mati _hurts_. Even tucked into the crook between jaw and shoulder, there is no room for her. When he wriggles forward through the dirt, it grinds her up against the walls of their narrow passageway, and she cries out at the pressure on her fragile wings.

"They’ll break, Jon," she sobs to him. "I, I’ll _break_ down here."

All her little bones. So fragile, so delicate, made for the sky. The _pressure_ of this place— it can’t be borne by a little bird. Not by anyone, really.

"We have to," he tells her, rasped and shaking. "We, we have to keep going, Mati. There’s no other way."

"Don’t," she pleads, shaking against him. "Don’t, don’t, Jon, please. _Please_. I can’t take it."

But they know they won’t ever die, down here. It’ll just be the crushing earth, forever. And Mati never able to stretch her wings again.

So he crawls.

Every inch is pain and crushing. Every inch is solid rock. Mati sobs softly against him, no room to move, struggling against the drag of the earth. The press of rock is so close there’s not even space for her to huddle against him, anymore, unless he keeps his head tilted at an awful angle to hold her close to his collarbone.

He does. It hurts. Everything is cramping and the press of the earth on all sides, the weight of it on him, his daemon so fragile against him.

When the roll of thunder hits, somewhere infinitely far away, they both know with horror what it will mean.

The rains come, and the earth shifts. Their dug-out tunnel presses on them.

The earth eats them.

Jon screams. He struggles madly to dig out a little pocket of air, anything so that he might _breathe_ , and in doing so he fails to shelter Mati. The rock and dirt presses down on them, too heavy to bear, and— and—

Some tiny bone in her wing snaps. They feel it as one more horrible _crushing_. Jon does not have the room to curl around her, to protect her. He does not have the room to move as the landslide slowly crunches his daemon to a broken, muddy little shape against his body.

They are badly hurt, when it’s over. He can’t tell how badly. They are both blind with Mati’s terror of being crushed into a broken, wingless thing. It feels as though they’re being compacted into one being without even room for limbs. Like a worm.

But, some nameless span of time further, he finds the wolverine.

"Daisy!"

" _Jon?_ "

It’s her, it’s her, he _feels_ her. When he pushes his fingers through the tight, hard-packed soil, his fingers brush fur. Jon flinches all over, and even that tiny movement earns him new pain from the rocks jutting into his belly, into his legs, into Mati’s tiny frame.

The wolverine presses _back_.

Jon goes, "oh," very small, and relief surges up like a warm and freeing tide. He squirms forward until he can press his whole hand to that furry flank, matted with mud but _warm_ like a living thing. His whole body thrills with electricity, with connection, with _Daisy_.

"Oh, my god," chokes Daisy, through the mud. "You’re _real_."

"Yeah," says Jon, stupid and delirious with it. Her soul shifts against his hand. His fingers are raw and bloody, skin scraped away and dirt in the wounds, but he— he’s touching Daisy’s soul. He found Daisy.

They stay like that for a long time. His fingers are in her daemon’s fur when she makes her statement, and it is like nothing else. It is— beyond anything. He _knows_ what live statements are: the thrill of tasting terror, the rush of riding along in someone else’s life, the _realness_ of it. The rightness of it. The bone-deep satisfaction as he sinks into her fear.

With his fingers raw and gritty in her daemon’s fur, it is a hundredfold more powerful. Every inch of his being is alight with the intimate connection of it, her fear a living thing under his hand. She is bared to him in every way a soul can be.

(After— forever after— he will Know: this is how statements _should_ be taken.

He will never do it again.)

It is easier, after the statement. They can shift, a little. Jon reaches, breath held as the bare and bloody inside of his wrist brushes the whole length of Lottie’s flank, and his heart jumps when his fingers brush Daisy’s. He hears her little intake of breath, and then she stretches, struggles an inch further, so that they can hook their fingers together and hold on.

Her fingers are raw and gritty with dirt, but they are warm. He clings to this knowledge, tries to catalogue every little sensation of _Daisy_ , tries to breathe steady and shallow where the wet earth cups his face.

They stay that way for a long time.

Later— much later— they make it out. It is a blur of pain and struggle and Mati, half-broken, madly trembling, against his throat. He perhaps half-carries, half-pushes Lottie along, at some point. There’s just— there’s no room for anything else. When they get her to the front, she digs, and there is nothing to listen to but their shared breathing and the scrape of the wolverine’s paws.

He never lets go of Daisy’s hand.

And then they are out.

Mati tumbles to the ground, and Jon hits his knees after her. Daisy staggers, gasping, against the coffin. Around them, a murmuring sea of voices, are dozens and dozens of tape recorders.

Basira, with Aadila held openly in her hands, _stares_.

(Mati flies with a limp forever after, one wing fluttering slightly out of time with the other, struggling against the air. Her belly-feathers had always been a crisp and perfect white, but now they can never seem to get the dirt out.

It is worth it.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content warnings for this chapter:**  
>  \- Claustrophobia and panic  
> \- Violence against daemons (broken bone)  
> \- Daemon-touching
> 
>  **Spoilers in this chapter:**  
>  \- Refers to events through 132.
> 
>  **Daemons in this chapter:**  
>  \- Jon's Eurasian sparrowhawk ( _Accipiter nisus_ ) Mati - Sanskrit for _intelligence/understanding_ , and a Greek term for the evil eye.  
> \- Daisy Tonner’s wolverine ( _Gulo gulo_ ) - Lottie, for a variety of lavender.  
> \- Basira Hussain’s Dampier monitor lizard ( _Varanus sparnus_ ) - Aadila, meaning _one who acts with justice and fairness_.


	11. (dark) heading into a pure black void

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This fic is now one week old! I am AMAZED at the reception. Y'all are incredible!! Thank you so much for joining me and keeping me going.

Mati is restless the whole way to Ny-Ålesund. At least once a day, they stand in the seaspray, tasting harsh brine on the air, with her standing one-footed on his shoulder and his scarred hand sheltering her from the wind.

"It’s not worth worrying about," he tells her, as she trembles there. "The Dark."

"Of course it is," she scoffs.

"We don’t die easily, now," he says, as though that’s any consolation and not its own terror to consider. "We’ve been getting stronger."

"By _feeding,_ " she agrees, tone poisonous. "By reaching into people’s minds, their _souls—_ "

His shoulders are tight and he is standing very still. "I don’t—"

"You _want_ to," she accuses, bitter and small. "You want to touch them, Jon. _I_ want it, too."

That hits him like a punch to the gut; it takes his breath away. For a moment, Jon can say nothing at all.

"I won’t," he says, finally, his voice small, and Mati scoffs at him. She tightens her wings to her back, puts her bad foot down with a wince he can feel secondhand.

"You will. We will. It’s a matter of time, Jon."

He turns sharply, enough to dislodge her; Mati gives a little sound of offense and flutters to alight on his arm, instead. He shakes her off, feeling spiteful. "Don’t tell me that. We’re not _touching_ anyone. That was a, a very specific circumstances—"

She perches on the old steel railing, fluttering to keep her balance, and glares at him.

"You liked it. We _liked_ it, we want to do it all the time, like that man—"

"—I didn’t—"

"—you _wanted_ to! You wanted to, to dig your fingers deep in his fur, and watch how much it hurt her—"

" _Stop_ it!" He swats her off her perch. It’s stupid, and childish, and she’s expecting it anyway; Mati flits just further down, to what _should_ be the edge of their range. That’s changed, since Mike Crew. Now the hard limit of _nostoptoofar_ isn’t where it had been; instead there is a much longer stretch of _almostalmostalmosttoomuch_ , a sensation that makes him dizzy and breathless. The vertigo-stretch of Vast, in miniature.

She goes to that part of their range now, just to see him stumble. Good: they’re both being petty, then.

"You want them afraid," Mati bites out at him. "So do I. It’s what we _are_ , Jon."

He chokes on whatever he tries to say next. Doesn’t even know what it was supposed to be, really.

"Fine," he gets out, finally. It’s less forceful than he’d like, more— more shaken, more lost. "What do we _do_ about it?"

"We admit it," she says, primly. "And we don’t _start_."

He hisses. "Bit late for that."

He doesn’t even know which way he means it, really. The man who’d told him his story, or the electric thrill of feeling Daisy’s soul shivering against his hands. It’s addictive, he knows, that thrill beyond anything else. _Pure_ fear, pure connection—

"I’m afraid," she says, as though explaining to a very stubborn child, "of what the Dark will do to me. Because I’m afraid of what will happen _after_ , Jon."

He subsides, folds his arms over his chest to lean back against the railing. Slowly, reluctantly, she flutters back into their comfortable range. Puts her bad foot up.

"In the Statements," he says. "Those touched by the Dark— their daemons—"

"Their daemons go blind," she agrees.

"And you think that would do something… bad, to us."

"I do," she agrees. "I— normally, I don’t think it would stick. Not with the way cutting off a finger went. But..."

She stretches out that foot that isn’t wounded, flexing her unblemished toes. Bachman’s toothmarks are still scratched over her leg-scales, though. And the once-white fluff around her legs still holds some trace of gritty, grave-dirt brown.

"I think it’s different," she murmurs, such that he hears her more in his mind than on the salty wind. "When it’s something like this."

"You think it’ll take," he says. "It’ll— you’ll lose your sight, if not worse."

"If not worse," she agrees, and shuffles her wings as she tucks that foot back up into her fluff again. " _Can_ the soul of the Archivist be blind? What would that _mean?_ Maybe it’ll just kill us outright."

He doesn’t have anything really to say to that.

In the end, it doesn’t matter.

When Jon looks upon that dark star, that single point of blacker-than-black, it hits like a freight train. His mind blanks out with the creeping, gorgeous, awful glory of it— he could fall in and in and into it— light and understanding devoured, stretched into slivers of nothing, snuffed out by the eternity of black— pure and distilled from the dark fabric of the cosmos itself, the lightless backdrop of the universe—

Mati falls off his shoulder.

Jon drops only a few moments later.

When they come to, it is with Basira’s hand on Jon’s shoulder and Aadila’s little lizard-tongue flicking soft against Mati’s face. The two halves of the Archivist bolt upright at once, dazed and sluggish, and they immediately reach for each other.

"Mati—"

"Jon—"

"Can you—?" 

"I can see." There is an odd, wondering sort of laugh in Mati’s voice, and Aadila holds carefully still to watch the little bird stagger. She stands with both feet, seeming to forget the burn-that-isn’t-there. "God, Jon, I could see—"

"I could, too—"

"It was _beautiful._ " Mati looks up into Jon’s face, awe in her voice, and his breath catches.

Her eyes had been a bright and clear red-amber, before. Nearly luminescent in their brightness, and almost precisely the color of blood.

They’re different, now. From edge to edge, her eyes are _dark_ , and the only light surviving in them comes in little flecks of brightness. Like amber stars.

"Mati?" he asks, voice shaking.

"I can _see_ ," she says again, and the excitement cresting in her feels _wrong_. He feels it secondhand, in the back of his mind, dissonant against his own rising alarm. "God, Jon, I can see so much _more_ now. Everything is so beautiful."

"Jon," says Basira, low and grounding. "Might want to explain this one."

"It’s alright," laughs Mati, turning to her now, to address the women directly. Basira jolts back the tiniest fraction in surprise. It’s— intimate, or unusual, or _wrong,_ being spoken to so directly by someone else’s soul. Never mind the intensity of that dark gaze, stars in her eyes. "Oh, Basira. And Aadila. You’re so beautiful."

Basira is quiet a moment, then stands up, apparently decided. "Right. Stay here."

"Basira—"

"One second."

And then she’s gone, striding off. Jon sighs heavily, and Mati flaps, confident as ever, to alight on his shoulder.

"Oh, Jon," she says. "You could see it too, if you really looked. Everything is— everything is so _detailed_. It’s all… bright. Like the stuff daemons are made of."

"Mati," he says, shaky, "can you still see my face?"

"Jon," she says back, almost pitying. "I don’t need to. I can see _you_."

(Sometimes he understands. The eddies in the air when people speak their stories, the beautiful and intricate patterns of gold Dust he can _see_ when he draws on a statement—

Still. Mati’s vision is always _odd_ , after that. She can never quite pick out hue or shade, and seems unaware of shadows. Or perhaps _everything_ is shadows, for her, and the only things she can still make out are the beautiful eddies of gold that compose person and daemon and the cityscape of London around them.

It is months later, after _the statement of Jonah Magnus,_ that Jon understands in perfect clarity. The way fear twists in a person, the way they speak it into the air around them in intricate whorls of gold— it’s _beautiful_.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content warnings for this chapter:**  
>  \- Altered perception  
> \- Change in the appearance of Mati's eyes
> 
> **Spoilers in this chapter:**  
>  \- Refers to events through 143.
> 
> **Daemons in this chapter:**  
>  \- Jon's Eurasian sparrowhawk ( _Accipiter nisus_ ) Mati - Sanskrit for _intelligence/understanding_ , and a Greek term for the evil eye.  
> \- Basira Hussain’s Dampier monitor lizard ( _Varanus sparnus_ ) - Aadila, meaning _one who acts with justice and fairness_.


	12. (desolation) i get a thrill outta playing with fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We're nearing the end, folks! After this, it's just the Lonely and then the Eye. I'd planned to end with a "+1" chapter of soft jonmartin content to recover, but it took on a life of its own (wordcount is 4k and rising), so I'll likely upload it as a separate work in the series.
> 
> This chapter features a glimpse of things to come, aka very recent S5 spoilers. Thanks for joining me!

Mati has a bad foot. Of all Jon’s scars, and of all _hers_ , this one is the most publicly noticeable and the least odd. It is unusual, but not unheard-of, that a person’s traumas be reflected on their soul. It is always cause for pity, when you see someone with a physical impairment and a daemon that hobbles in step— but there’s nothing _eldritch_ about it.

Jon dreads the act of a handshake, now. It’s not that the scar still hurts him; the wreck Jude Perry made of his hand is horrible to look at, skin twisted and discolored by scar tissue, but there is no lingering pain. Perhaps there should be. Perhaps there would be, were he still properly human.

But, well. It’s still horrible to look at. People hesitate, and try to slide glances to it without being too overt, and he always gets impatient with the attempt. Mati is the long-fused one, the polite one, the half of them with anything resembling a poker face. But it always shows in her posture, too-upright and too-alert, when she greets someone’s daemon and tries to ignore the way they stare.

"Does it _hurt_ you?" he asked, of the way she keeps her right foot tucked up close to her body at nearly all times. At a glance, it could be taken for relaxed posture— a raptor standing on one foot is generally calm and sleepy, and that is perhaps humorously at odds with Jon’s entire demeanor— but it always conflicts with the tight feathers and bright, hard eyes. Makes her look injured instead of relaxed.

There’s no scarring on _her_ foot, after all. No discoloration at all. She just… likes to keep it tucked close, as though the undersides of her little toes still sting with a burn.

"Sort of? Not _exactly_ ," she said. "It doesn’t still hurt _you_ , so there’s no reason it should hurt _me_. It just… it’s different, now."

"Different _how?_ "

"It doesn't feel right," she said, simply. "I remember the pain."

He recoiled at that, blinks at her, bemused and half-offended. "Well, so do _I._ "

"No," she said, "not really. It’s a bit distant for you, isn’t it? It happened to you, yes, but it’s also a story. It fed the thing that owns us."

"It’s _my_ hand!" Jon bristled like an enraged cat. "I’m not just a, a _statement_ —"

"Don’t be an idiot," she said. "Of course you are. Of course _we_ are."

"Then _why—_ "

"Because," she said, "I’m a _human_ soul, Jon. I’m the parts of us that can still hurt, even once the fire is gone."

(Later, after they woke up in a hospital bed with hundreds of tiny eye-shapes hidden in Mati’s wings, she stopped claiming things like that.)

When they first met her, Jude Perry’s daemon had been a shrike: a neat little bird with a wickedly hooked beak. She had been the colors of ash and charcoal and bone _._ The fade of orange up her wings should have been a gentle rust-red, Jon was fairly sure, not the searing glow he could swear he saw there. As though flame was creeping up from just below the coal-black feathers, instants away. As though every feather was _actually_ red-hot.

When they meet Jude Perry again, it is in a burning building. Mati no longer looks anything like herself at all. But then, neither does Perry’s daemon, really.

The shrike is properly on fire, now. She is missing feathers on her wings, and heat has eaten away skin and muscle; the slim bones are exposed, blackened with char. That reddish colouration up her back and belly is a _searing_ shade, and the air around it distorts in ripples. The daemon’s eyes are tiny and black and bright, and Jon does not doubt for an instant that he can see malice in them.

He is not afraid. Mati is not afraid. By now, after the Panopticon and Jonah’s statement and the weight of the Watcher, they don’t _have_ a part of them that still hurts. Or perhaps they don’t have a part that _isn’t_ constantly in agony; the two concepts have blurred past recognition. When torturous fear is the baseline, there is no room to feel the little extra ping of terror as a burning room begins to collapse. (There is no room to feel Martin’s gasping, heaving panic as anything but _one more suffering body_. He has billions to account for. It’s a drop in the ocean, really.)

So Jude laughs, and drawls her lazy excuses, and lets the building burn around them. It would be difficult to see her through the fire and smoke, through the heat-warped air, but Jon can see everything now. Mati's eyes are again bright and clear.

They watch Jude gesture expansively, proud in her domain, delighting in the way Martin huddles around his hare daemon and fights for breath. They watch the way that burning shrike flits closer for a better look, a better chance to gloat.

Mati pounces before anyone has time to process what’s happened. Jon is not surprised.

Perry’s gasp is very satisfying. Mati is bigger now: she can pin a shrike with one taloned foot. The little bird struggles, flaps its ruined wings, and its feathers sear with hellfire. Jon sets his jaw and makes no sound at the pain. Mati _hisses_ , a deep rattling sound that might readily come from a snake. If there’s pain in the sound, there is also _threat_.

"I am going to end you," he tells Perry, just to see what she has to say about it. She is wide-eyed, shocked still, her daemon pinned beneath the vice grip of his. The underside of Mati’s foot is sizzling. It’s her bad foot. This is, distantly, funny.

Neither of them flinches from the pain. They’ve rather lost that ability.

"Y-you’re _bluffing,_ " says Perry.

He isn’t.

It is unlikely that squeezing talons through her little shrike would be enough to kill her, things being what they are. Still. They do not even attempt to give her that mercy.

There’s not even charcoal left, in the end. And when Mati flies back to his shoulder, she perches solidly with two unblemished feet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content warnings for this chapter:**  
>  \- Discussion of burn scars and burning buildings
> 
>  **Spoilers in this chapter:**  
>  \- First half of chapter draws from 089; second half draws from 169.
> 
>  **Daemons in this chapter:**  
>  \- Jon's Eurasian sparrowhawk ( _Accipiter nisus_ ) Mati - Sanskrit for _intelligence/understanding_ , and a Greek term for the evil eye.  
> \- Jude Perry's long-tailed shrike ( _Lanius schach_ ).


	13. (lonely) lie where i land let my bones turn to sand

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another set of lyrics I recommend looking up!
> 
> We're very near the end now. If you'd like more Peter & Elias daemon content, see the other fic in this series.

There are stories about the _Tundra_. In the statements, and in the ever-present web of Institute gossip, it’s said to be haunted.

This would not be altogether unusual, nor surprising. Old, eerie cargo ships lend themselves well to tales of ghosts and hauntings. The issue is that the stories are always very consistent, and very specific.

The _Tundra_ is haunted by daemons.

Daemons without their people, that is. Which is— near-impossible, obviously. It is _exceptionally_ rare to survive severance, and the sort of topic not fit for everyday conversation; it brings to mind war crimes, horrific experimentation, torture of the very soul.

But this is the Magnus Institute. Severance is a major topic of research.

So perhaps it is not so universally-understood a name as _Leitner_ , but even so: the tenured researchers of the Institute know about the _Tundra_. They know that the daemon-ghosts in the stories are horribly consistent: a cat that huddles starved and silent below decks, a starling perched mourning on the headstay, a dog curled on the prow that is always softly weeping. The cast rotates with the years, as though the ghosts simply fade away once they’ve served some sentence. New ones always take their place.

Because of this, Jon is already cold with dread and expectation, when he reaches the Panopticon.

It is exactly as he feared.

Elias is smiling. He’s still wearing one of those gaudy glass insect-daemon cases, though it must have been confiscated from him in prison; perhaps the guards were moved by revulsion and gave it back to him, so that he might cover up his horrific state. The ruse is not very good. Jon can _See_ , now, how alone he is.

Just as he can See that the hunched and emaciated thing atop the Panopticon is his. It is an exceptionally large owl, and must have been beautiful, once. Now, its feathers are matted grey with cobwebs, and there is very nearly nothing left of it but the eyes.

They are horrible eyes. The light in them is _wrong_. Even here, where it is not directly looking, Jon feels the weight of that gaze upon him. It is a cloying, prickling attention, itching at the edges of his mind.

But that is not the problem. Elias, eyes alight with excitement and daemon hunched like an ancient gargoyle atop the Panopticon— he is not the _problem_.

He is also not the only person in the room. Well: not the only half-person, anyway.

Martin’s hare daemon is crouched, listless, on the ancient stone floor.

For an inane moment, Jon thinks he is dead or dying. He scrambles to the hare’s side and drops to his knees, hovering over him, helpless. Horror and revulsion have closed his throat and turned his thoughts to static.

Mati, ever clearheaded, flutters down from his shoulder and hops close to the fallen daemon’s soft brown head.

"Brawne?" she is shaking. "Brawne, can you hear me?"

The hare makes no reply. Slowly, he rolls one glassy eye at her, then closes it again. His body rises and falls in a dragged-out sigh. It hurts to look at.

"Brawne? Brawne, where is he?" panic pitches her voice higher, makes her sound smaller. "We, we’ll get him back, just— please, look at me—"

Jon looks to Elias. He is still smiling. He looks— Jon realizes it with another lurch of nausea— _proud._

"Are you afraid?" asks Elias, soft and savoring.

"Yes," says Jon. Because he knows what comes next.

Mati does, too, and whirls on him.

"You _can’t._ " Before he can process it, she is upon him, fluttering and catching at him with her talons. He gasps and jolts back a step, and she peppers him with tiny claw-punctures that are gone as soon as she’s made them. "Jonathan Sims, you _cannot leave me._ "

"Martin is in there." His voice breaks. He can’t help it. He hates, _hates_ , that Elias is drinking in every second. "Mati, _please._ "

"No!" It is nearly a shriek. She flies at him again, and he raises an arm to defend himself; she clutches his wrist, latches on there, still flapping. One wing is faintly out of sync with the other: the broken one, never healed all the way right. One foot doesn’t clutch as hard as the other: the one Perry burned secondhand.

"I am _part of you,_ " cries the little hawk, and Jon can do nothing but hold her up and stare as she digs those needle-talons into his arm. "You can’t just _leave me behind._ "

"I’m sorry," he says, softly. "I have to go and get him."

"By _leaving me!_ "

"We can’t let them be like this," he says, tremble in his voice, and knows that Brawne has raised his head now. Those long, curved ears have swiveled in their direction. The exhaustion is spelled out in every hunched line of his body, but for this, he is listening. "We— we _can’t_. I can’t."

"You’re doing the same to _me,_ " sobs Mati, and he realizes they are crying. Hawks do not cry tears. Humans do. His eyes burn with them.

Elias is still watching, and still smiling. Brawne, still crouched shaking on the floor, settles back into that awful blank torpor.

"I love you," Jon says to his daemon. "I’ll be back."

And then he goes.

It is the worst pain.

The Desolation had been needles and hellfire; the Buried had been the inexorable, horrific _crush_ of feeling their body break; the Vast had been a sudden, dizzying tear. This is none of those things.

This is the knowledge that he had torn his heart from his body and left it on a cold stone floor, somewhere very far away. Vulnerable, bleeding, and too distant to ever reach. Mati is gone now. Jon Sims is incomplete, less than half a person: he is alone.

And he did this to them. She’d begged him not to.

It is not a ripping pain, like he’d expected. It is not the abrupt yank and vertigo of the Vast. He’d thought that would prepare them for this, but now he understands: nothing could. The Lonely is vast and cold and wreathed in a pale, flat mist that numbs everything away. Every little movement echoes for miles. It is _empty_ , here.

Jon has made himself empty, too.

Peter Lukas, of course, is there to gloat.

When Jon rips the statement from him, there is one piece of knowledge he savors most spitefully: he _pries_ for the man’s daemon, with his hooks in Lukas and the taste of static in his teeth. And Lukas, nearly snarling with strain, crumples for him.

"Relicta," he chokes out, bitter like a curse. "She’s an albatross. They can stay aloft above the ocean for vast stretches of time. Some spend a whole decade at sea, never touching land."

He tells the story of learning to leave her behind, a little at a time. Leaning into that sweet pain of separation, that euphoria of emptiness, the safety of the fog.

He has not seen her for decades now.

It’s better that way.

When he is finished, Jon pries at him for answers. For the _truth_ , for the reason he is here, for whatever game has Elias standing on that far shore where he has _left his own soul behind_ and _smiling_ at him—

Peter Lukas will not buckle for him. Jon presses so intently at the seams of his mind that he _splits,_ instead.

When the man finally comes apart, screaming, some part of Jon distantly Knows: somewhere very far away, his daemon’s own death will take her by surprise. Separated by an impossible expanse of cold fog, she had barely felt his pain at all, and hadn’t understood a moment of it. With him in here, she didn’t really belong to him in any way that mattered.

He finds Martin again, after. Martin with fog in his eyes. Martin alone.

"Brawne is waiting, Martin," he prompts, and only watches the man tighten in upon himself. Martin is a big man, he knows. Here, he is nothing but hunched shoulders and a small, drawn look with all the emotion washed out. The fog renders him so pale he’s hardly there at all.

"I left him," says Martin. "He’s gone."

"He’s not," pleads Jon. "He’s waiting. I saw him."

"I left him alone. I’d been doing it for a long time."

"He’s still there." He catches Martin’s hands in his. They are big hands. They are cold. "You can have him back, Martin. He’s waiting for you. He needs you."

"He doesn’t want me. Not really." The sigh that comes from him is a whisper of wind, echoing. "I left him."

" _I_ need you."

"You don’t, though. No one does."

Jon makes a frustrated, desperate little noise. It is hot in his throat; he clings to that, and clutches at Martin’s arms instead, digs his fingers in. He feels, a little hysterically, like Mati. " _Please_ , Martin. You can— you can have me. Just— look at me."

He tries to put it in his eyes. He tries to press it to Martin’s mind, his fingers hot on Martin’s cold arms. He wishes, _desperately_ , that Mati and Brawne were here: he would tangle his fingers in Brawne’s short fur, which looks so thick and soft. He would guide Martin’s fingertips into the softest fluff of Mati’s breast and press them there so that he could feel their heat. He wants to press Martin so close against him he can feel the man in his _soul_ —

Martin looks at him, and his eyes… melt, a little. The cold pale of the fog starts to burn away.

"I see..." There is a beautiful little crease forming between his brows, all incredulity. Jon’s nails are leaving crescent marks in his arm. Jon would leave them in his soul, given the chance. He needs Martin to _see that_.

Martin’s voice comes softly shocked, then, half a laugh. "I— I see you. I _see_ you."

Jon’s entire being, the half of it left to him, seems to go loose with relief. Martin’s little laugh catches, chokes off, goes sideways into a sob.

"I— I was all on my own—"

Jon holds his hand the whole way back.

They leave nail-marks in each other’s hands, near to bleeding. He would want nothing else.

(In the Panopticon, Elias is gone, and Mati is so very soft when he presses his face against her.

Later, so is Brawne, under his scarred, careful fingers.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content warnings for this chapter:**  
>  \- Canon-typical Lonely depression  
> \- Brief mention of canon-typical eldritch murder
> 
>  **Spoilers in this chapter:**  
>  \- Refers to events through 159.
> 
>  **Daemons in this chapter:**  
>  \- Jon's Eurasian sparrowhawk ( _Accipiter nisus_ ) Mati - Sanskrit for _intelligence/understanding_ , and a Greek term for the evil eye.  
> \- Martin's European hare ( _Lepus europaeus_ ) Brawne - for the fiancée and muse of Keats.  
> \- Peter's wandering albatross ( _Diomedea exulans_ ) Relicta - Latin for _deserted_. Because the Lukas family is Like That.  
> \- Jonah's Eurasian eagle-owl ( _Bubo bubo_ ) though not mentioned, his name is Virgil - for the character in the the _Divine Comedy_ , because Jonah is enough of an asshole to think this is fitting.  
> 


	14. (eye) they will build me no shrines

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And here we are! Thank you all for joining me on this journey, where I bang out about 3k/day of daemon fic, fueled only by stress and internet kudos.
> 
> If you enjoyed this work, please leave **kudos** (to feed my confidence) and **subscribe** to me or to this series (because there is a lot more TMA daemon content coming)!
> 
> Enjoy these sad boys.

After the Lonely, still clutching Martin’s slowly-warming hand, he looks up again to the top of the Panopticon.

The soul of Jonah Magnus looks back at him, though it does not move its head. By the cobwebs that drape thick and grey from its feathers, heavy as a second skin, it perhaps has not moved its head in decades.

It is with a total lack of surprise, and perhaps some distant amusement, that he realizes it is an owl. Of course it would be, given the symbol carved over the Institute’s doors. Of course everyone always _knew_ the soul of Jonah Magnus had been an owl. He just hadn’t thought he would ever see it.

It wasn’t always grey with cobwebs and age, he’s certain. With the ear-tufts that stand erect like radio antennas, he supposes it is an eagle-owl. Absolutely massive, and sharp, and powerful. He wonders what it had looked like, when it’d been healthy and properly alive, not hunched and emaciated like an ancient gargoyle. Motes of dust drift before its impossibly wide eyes. The colour of them hurts to look at; the colour of them is _everything at once_. It seems to drink in every tiny eddy of movement, every speck of detail: or perhaps its gaze is turned somewhere far away, to something more horrific.

Perhaps it’s all the Watcher, now, and not really a soul at all.

He thinks of it often, on the way to the safehouse. He dozes against Martin’s shoulder on the train, and feels the soft brush of Mati against his neck— the sensation muted, now, there’s this _distance_ between them that just hurts and hurts and hurts— and he wonders if that’s always the fate for an avatar’s daemon. Wonders if it’s only because Jonah attempted a ritual, and poured too much of his patron through himself. Maybe it is like letting the whole ocean through at once, and the wave is too much for a self to sustain. Maybe the daemon’s mind is carried away in the flood.

But then there is Martin, and Scotland, and relatively good cows. And Jon manages to forget, for a little while, the unreal and broken color of that owl’s eyes.

He cannot forget for very long. Because then the statement comes.

Mati is swept up with him, when he reads. She stands still as a statue, rigidly upright as though receiving signal from somewhere just out of earshot and on the verge of understanding. Her red eyes go cracked and strange and _too much_ , leaden with a horrible pressure. He can recognize it, now: it’s the same look in the eyes of Jonah’s soul. It’s the Watcher looking out.

"Statement," says the Archivist, as his daemon watches, impassive, with eyes that are not her own, "of Jonah Magnus."

The changes begin slowly in Mati. He can feel them, as he reads. He can feel the euphoria of Jonah Magnus, the _victory_ , the fizzing champagne _delight_ at having waited so very, very long and having cracked this mystery _perfectly open—_

He can feel the building pressure behind his eyes, the taste of static in his teeth, the trembling thunder that shakes apart his soul until his little sparrowhawk is seizing and spasming on the table—

" _You who watch and know and understand none—_ " She cries out, in her small voice, and tries to struggle a step towards him, but her legs give out. " _You who listen and hear and will not comprehend—_ "

"Jon!" Her wings flare and then she can’t seem to shut them again, pinned splayed-out like a butterfly, all the little eye-marks on display. There are hundreds. They are all watching. _It_ is watching through her.

 _"You who wait and wait and drink in all that is not yours by right._ "

" _Jon_ ," moans his daemon, but her eyes are deep and wrong. All her eyes. She has so many, many eyes.

"Bring all that is fear and all that is terror and all that is the awful dread—"

She is sobbing. He cannot. His voice is not his own.

He cannot tell, anymore, if the sob is despair or euphoria.

"—that crawls and chokes and blinds and falls and twists and leaves and hides and weaves and burns and hunts and rips and leads and _dies_!"

" _I, I— J-Jon, I—_ "

" _Come to us_ ," he intones, static in his mouth and in his bones and in his mind and in his eyes, and in his daemon. Her voice joins his, unwilling, warped with the resonance.

 _"I—"_ they say it together, they are before a god, they _are_ a god—

 _"OPEN—"_ her wings splay wider, her eyes and eyes and eyes open to consume all that she is, black pupil on white sclera on black pupil—

_"— **THE DOOR!** "_

Mati screams as she changes. It is agony and exaltation and terror, terror, his whole _soul_ is fear.

They do not wake up for a long time.

When they do, it’s because Martin is there. His hands are on Jon’s face. Jon tries to sit up, blinking muzzily, trying to— trying to—

His head is full of—

He’s—

**_Maggots and mold and people screaming as they’re chewed by a million tiny mouths, deeper and deeper—_ **

"What…?"

**_The throat-tearing scream, the wail of someone you know is precious but you cannot save, they are burning and writhing and you— you can’t—_ **

"Oh, oh god, what—?"

**_Too-close-cannot-breathe the choke of wet soil in a throat, pressing into the sinuses, the—_ **

"JON!"

Martin slaps him again. Oh. Oh, yes, right. Martin.

" _Jon_ ," he says, pleading. Jon stares glassily back at him. Martin drags in a shuddering breath, squares his shoulders, and nods to someone down behind Jon. Brawne. Jon can’t quite bring himself to shift around to look at the daemon, but he sees him anyway, from a perspective that doesn’t make any sense.

The hare presses his soft brown nose to Jon’s hand. He jolts hard, at that. _Worryloveconnectionfear_ sings through him.

"Oh," Jon says softly, breathless as he comes back to himself. "Martin. B-Brawne. I— what happened?"

Martin and Brawne trade uneasy glances. The hare presses his cheek to Jon, unwilling to give up the contact. That is good; Jon leans into it, as delicately as he can. It’s… centering, to have the heart-like thrum of a daemon pressed to him.

Because.

Because Mati doesn’t come to him, to comfort him. He feels the rush of air under her wings as she takes to the windowsill, instead.

Martin whips around, angry and terribly afraid. At once, Jon understands why.

His daemon is not a sparrowhawk. And his daemon has little notice for him, now.

She is larger, all rounded dark shapes. Her plumage is nothing but pupil-black and scelra-white. She is eclipsed by it, by the millions of eyes that somehow cram into the shape of a bird. He Knows that she is a black-banded owl, _Ciccaba huhula,_ and that it is natural for her body to be void-dark and starred with white crescent eyes _._ He knows that her own eyes should be black.

Her eyes are so much worse than black.

"Mati?" murmurs Martin, so very soft and hopeful and _afraid_ , and Jon begins to laugh.

Mati doesn’t laugh. Mati doesn’t stop him.

Mati only looks out the window, to the writhing and twitching hellscape spread as far as the Eye can see. She looks, and she _watches._

"The sky, Martin," laughs Jon, and he still tastes static in his teeth. Perhaps he’ll never stop. "Look at the sky. It’s looking _back._ "

Martin is so very afraid.

And, worst of all, the Archivist _likes_ it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Content warnings for this chapter:**  
>  \- Disorientation  
> \- Personality alteration  
> \- Brief glimpses of Corruption, Desolation, Buried horror
> 
>  **Spoilers in this chapter:**  
>  \- Refers to events through 160.
> 
>  **Daemons in this chapter:**  
>  \- Jon's ~~Eurasian sparrowhawk ( _Accipiter nisus_ )~~ Black-banded owl ( _Strix huhula_ ) Mati.  
> \- Martin's European hare ( _Lepus europaeus_ ) Brawne - for the fiancée and muse of Keats.  
> \- Jonah's Eurasian eagle-owl ( _Bubo bubo_ ) though not mentioned, his name is Virgil - for the character in the the _Divine Comedy_ , because Jonah is enough of an asshole to think this is fitting.
> 
>  **What comes next:**  
>  \- A soft jonmartin epilogue is on the way! It'll be posted as its own work. Expect 4-5k.  
> \- This fic is being reworked into a **full rewrite of TMA with daemons and Dust** , which will also be posted separately. In the spirit of such works as He Says He Is An Experimental Theologian (WTNV) or Daemorphing (Animorphs), it should be completely linear and friendly to readers with no canon familiarity. Goal is 80k, including rewritten excerpts of key statements.
> 
> Thank you all for being lovely & supportive & my inspiration to keep going! It's been a blast.


End file.
